A banker who advises some of China's hottest startups shares what he looks for in an entrepreneur

He has provided mergers-and-acquisitions advice and underwritten
initial public offerings for some of China's hottest startups. He
also works with venture capitalists to help them
identify top pre-IPO companies for investment.

He has advised on the $1.78 billion US listing of the Chinese
e-commerce company JD.com, the $286 million
public offering of the microblogging app Weibo, and the
merger of the ride-hailing rivals Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache.

When searching for a great startup, Bao says, the most important
thing to pay attention to is the entrepreneur behind it.

"Early-stage development is probably all about the
entrepreneur, or 90% about the entrepreneur," Bao
told Business Insider in a recent interview in San Francisco.
"Even if the idea is somewhat less than perfect, he'll somehow
figure out a way to make it perfect."

A good startup needs an entrepreneur who's the right
match for the task at hand.

"You have to understand what the job entails and you have
to understand the individual, whether there is a match," Bao
said.

He provided two examples:

"If you do a social network, the entrepreneur better be young,
the same generation as the users, a great product guy, have
unique insight into the users and the needs and wants of the
users, and be really passionate about the stuff he is doing. He's
not just making the product, creating a company, making a little
money, but he truly believes his product can help his folks, or
her folks, to make things differently. So that's
one.

"But if you're an enterprise guy, you're probably a bit
older, and you need to be able to manage a pretty large
engineering team. And the thing about enterprise is you have to
sell. So the best enterprise entrepreneurs we have seen are more
sales-y types, like coming from a selling and marketing
perspective as opposed to a product-development
perspective."

The biggest challenge, he said, is gauging these things
while many entrepreneurs have no real experience.

Inexperience does not deter Bao,
however. The youngest entrepreneur his firm
advises is 21.